At Home on Hendrik

Last time I checked in, we had just demolished the first wall in between the little hotel rooms. Shortly thereafter, we commandeered that room (now know as “bedroom 23”) to be our bedroom:

There’s enough room to have a double bed running lengthwise in the room, plus about 3-4 feet at the foot of the bed and one of the built in shelving units to the side of the bed. It sure beats climbing into bunkbeds every night!

Yesterday our friend Drew came over and we planned to tear down another wall to create a similar guest bedroom between bedrooms 4 and 5, which are also on the starboard side of the corridor (which now runs, from the saloon: single room full of oars, our bedroom, the guest bedroom, our wardrobe). Here’s the guest bedroom partially made up with a few bits of futon and random foam mattresses we still need to get rid of:

But with the three of us handling a power drill each, tearing down that wall went way faster than we anticipated so we decided to tear down the wall between James’s office and the next room so he’d have space for his massive 6 foot desk and to actually get stuff done. Only having accomplished that, we went a little crazy and decided to tear down the walls separating that now double-length room and the corridor! Apart from a few hanging fire alarm cables and some dangling light switches, it came down just as easily as the interior walls (and the ceiling didn’t cave in – a definite plus!).

So here’s James’s new open plan office (not cleaned or set up yet, sorry!), first facing towards the front of the boat, and then facing the back, looking towards the steps to the saloon:

So now on the port side of the boat from the saloon forward, the rooms run thusly: the single room full of kitchen stuff, a room full of our bits of wall and insulation (we need to get a skip to tear down any more!), my sewing room, James’s open-plan office, then the quad room full of furniture we need to get rid of.

And in other news, spring is officially here on the moorings! The goslings which were so carefully nested by the Canada goose on our rubbish barge have now hatched, and we’ve also spotted some Mallard ducklings, though the baby Coots (cootlings?) have not yet shown their faces.

Another sign that it’s coming into prime tourist season is that the cruise ships have started stopping by us again. We’ve had two giant cruise ships parked in the middle of the river by us already, with more to come, I’m sure! They don’t actually come near the shore, but instead have the PLA barge dock alongside the ship, where smaller charter boats then ferry the passengers back and forth to the shore. Much more exciting, however, was the arrival of HMS Exeter Saturday evening, being pulled/pushed by two tugs, and moving at an incredible speed up the Thames, through an opened Tower Bridge, to eventually dock alongside HMS Belfast.

All the sailors were on deck during the journey, but I’m not sure if that was because of the view, or whether they were that impatient to let loose in Soho for the night!